When we last checked in with Scott Pruitt, it had just emerged that his $100,000 taxpayer-funded getaway to Morocco last year was, surprise surprise, organized by a longtime pal who is currently being paid $40,000 a month to “promote the kingdom’s cultural and economic interests.” That revelation, of course, followed similar reports exposing Pruitt’s shady housing arrangement with an energy lobbyist; his request for the E.P.A to rent him a $100,000-a-month private jet; his alleged habit of making travel decisions based on his “desire to visit particular cities or countries rather than official business” and to then tell staff to “‘find me something to do [in those locations]’ to justify the use of taxpayer funds”; his alleged habit of staying in hotels that vastly exceeded the government per diem, sometimes by 300 percent; his $43,000 illegal phone booth; his decision to give two longtime aides huge bonuses after they were denied by the White House and also to lie about them; his insistence on using lights and sirens to speed through traffic in order to get to cocktail hour on time; and his fondness for demoting or reassigning people who object to his demands. The fact that he was able to hold onto his job after all this, despite working for a guy who supposedly takes great pleasure in firing people, suggests that there is basically nothing Pruitt could do that would result in his dismissal. Not even entertaining an alleged pederast on the taxpayer dime.

We learned as much on Friday when, during a meeting at the White House, the president was asked if he still had confidence in the E.P.A. administrator, to which Trump responded, “Yes, I do.” That question presumably came up because a day earlier, The New York Times had reported that Pruitt shared a meal at a five-star restaurant in Italy with, among others, Cardinal George Pell, a Vatican official the E.P.A reportedly knew was under investigation for alleged child sexual abuse. (Per the E.P.A.’s own statement, Pell was charged with multiple sexual offenses less than three weeks later.) According to Times reporter Eric Lipton, not only did Pruitt break $240 per-person bread with Pell (and that’s without the wine pairing!), but the E.P.A. also apparently went to great lengths to make sure no one knew the accused sex offender was there, despite a senior aide to Pruitt writing an e-mail from the table, noting she was with the two men.

And therein, of course, lies the reason Pruitt can pal around with accused sex offenders and jet around the world on taxpayers’ dimes with almost total job security. As long as he’s gutting Obama-era regulations and turning the environment into a truck-stop toilet bowl—and all reports say he has, even in spite of the corruption distractions—he’s fine in Donald Trump’s book.

In a statement, E.P.A. spokesman Jahan Wilcox stressed that Pell was merely “one of 12 to 15 individuals”; that the E.P.A. supposedly had no idea that Pell was coming; and that “it is also important to note that Cardinal Pell was not charged until June 29, 2017, three weeks after the dinner with several Vatican officials took place.” Noted!

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Trump did not call for Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices, an idea the industry had feared, and he did not revisit the caustic rhetoric that marked his presidential campaign. Instead, most of Trump’s proposals disclosed during a White House Rose Garden event focused on the middlemen who negotiate drug costs on behalf of insurance companies, a group pharma would love to see slip into the White House’s crosshairs.

The two largest indices for biotech and pharmaceutical companies rose about 2 percent after Trump’s speech, as investors saw little to fear for drugmakers. The stock prices of Pfizer, Merck, Gilead Sciences, and Amgen all spiked after Trump’s speech. Wall Street analysts said the speech posed few threats to the drug industry on the whole.

“There may be some one-off sacrificial lambs in there, but for the most part the focus is on reducing inefficiencies in the current system,” Brian Skorney, an analyst at Baird, told Stat. “These, in large part, aren’t benefiting the sector as a whole, so any success at reducing them is probably net neutral.”

In retrospect, AT&T wouldn’t have paid Trump’s “fixer” $600,000 for his “insights” into the administration

“Our company has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons these last few days and our reputation has been damaged,” C.E.O. Randall Stephensonwrote in an e-mail to employees on Friday. “There is no other way to say it— AT&T hiring Michael Cohen as a political consultant was a big mistake.” As The Washington Post revealed on Thursday, internal documents showed that Cohen was expected to “provide guidance on matters facing the company at the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department,” like, for example, its $85 billion Time Warner merger, currently being held up by a D.O.J. lawsuit. According to my colleague Joe Pompeo, sources at both companies and within the legal community are confident that the judge presiding in that case “won’t be influenced by anything outside of what he heard in the courtroom, and that he will rule based on how the merger may or may not harm consumers.” Still, the Taint o’ Cohen may be a hard one to shake!

Elsewhere!

At Deutsche Bank’s U.S. Unit, Anxiety Grows Before the Ax Falls (Bloomberg)